Monday, March 12, 2007

Blog of Oracle Server

Oracle is certainly an ancient thing. Oracle is blogging even before Mark Rittman thought about it. Alert Log file is the blog of Oracle. Oracle jots down here its musings,rants,experiences and complaints tirelessly.The location of this blog of Oracle is told to Oracle with the help of BACKGROUND_DUMP_DEST parameter in the init.ora file, which is the parameter file for the instance.

In its blog, Oracle marks its postings with a timestamp. Its postings are precise, un-baised, un-political,brief and un-passionate. You can't shut it up, neither you could control it. It will write what it feels. In its blog, Oracle writes about dreaded Ora-600 errors, about rare yet redoubtable Ora-1578 and DBA favourite Ora-60 errors. The Ora-60 errors are related to dead locks which is more than often a fault of developers, what better a DBA could ask for at the start of the day then to have Ora-60 errors in Oracle's blog.moreover, Oracle blogs about the sheer diligence of DBA when he atlast issues some administrative statements like create, alter and drop.

Oracle also blogs about when its blog went down (i.e. shutdown) and when it came up (i.e. startup). Oracle didnt get tired by posting about when it did the log switch and hence saved the world by checkpointing everything.Whenever the work horses of Oracle (i.e. server processes) gets tired and misbehave, Oracle blogs about this rarity leisurly. If any smart ass has given a go at materialized view and fumbled with its auto refresh, Oracle doesnt spare him in its blog.

Oracle also consider it important enough to blog the occurrance of non-default values of parameters at startup.This blog is read by countless numbers of Database Administrators (DBAs) around the globe. It can make or break their day. If the current postings of Oracle are happy enties then the DBA is happy and the database users are happy and if there are any black spots like Ora-00600, then the developer should beware of Evil DBA from Hell.

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